Minnesota Republicans Arizona-style Immigration Bill

Minnesota Republicans Arizona-style Immigration Bill – Following the controversial Arizona bill, Minnesota republicans are now offering a sticky bill of their own. The bill would create a Minnesota Illegal Immigration Enforcement Team that would require immigrants to carry an identification card that would identify them as immigrants and would let authorities know what stage their were at in their efforts to become an American citizen. The Arizona legislation made headlines after many had said that the bill would create more problems than it would solve. The bill gave officers free reign to demand documentation from individuals that they deemed as ‘suspicious.’ Opposition to the bill has said that they believe that it will allow officers to practice racial profiling, subliminally or not, and would do more harm than good for the state as a whole.

“We have an illegal immigration problem here in Minnesota,” said Representative Steve Drazkowski. “We’ve had it for years. We’ve tried as Republicans to bring some reforms to immigration policy in Minnesota. We’ve run into roadblocks each and every time.”
In the bills literature, it reads;
“For any lawful stop, detention, or arrest made by a law enforcement official… where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made… to determine the immigration status of the person.”
This bill will likely also receive a great deal of media attention. Some of those active in the federal government have asked that states wait to pass their own immigration reform laws, and to give the federal government a chance to make laws and legislation of their own to fix the problem.